


throwing shadows

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Blood Hexes, Cuban Lance (Voltron), Korean Keith (Voltron), Love Confessions, M/M, Texan Keith (Voltron), Trans Lance (Voltron), Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 08:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8095462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Dude,” Lance says, “It’s not my fault he does this!” 
“Dude,” Hunk says, and leaves it at that.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pepsiprince](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepsiprince/gifts).



Talk about the last gasp of summertime and call it what it is: the shift of the Earth towards dying, brutal as gravity, constant as breath. Talk about the end of seasons as the end of something, a last chance for the last-ditch kids to get their hooks in. Talk about the last weeks of August like that, just like that, and it makes sense it’s then that Keith rolls back into town.

Lance can tell he’s on the street before Keith even rounds the corner; the warning fire smells too much like gasoline for it to be anyone else. That, and the fact his iced tea suddenly boils over, spilling across the work surface and nearly scalding him. Pidge snatches their laptop out of the way of the mess and looks at him balefully.

“Dude,” Lance says, “It’s not my fault he does this!”

“ _Dude_ ,” Hunk says, and leaves it at that.

Lance is still mopping up when the doorbell jangles and Keith shoulders in, thumb hooked around his dumb utility belt. The crystals Hunk picked out for him - garnet, bronzite, bloodstones - hang off one side and swing against his thigh. They gleam in the sunlight, both like and not like the slow and heavy blink of Keith’s eyes.

“Honey, I’m home,” he says. The smell of gasoline from the fireplace is overwhelming.

“You know that belt makes you look like a cheap Eighties -” Lance starts and doesn’t finish, because Keith kisses him. Lance slips one hand up the back of his shirt, presses his hand against the small of Keith’s back, and turns his own veins to ice. It’s not exactly how the magic works, but it’s the easiest way to explain the way it contracts and expands beneath Lance’s ribs with each breath. It’s not exactly how the magic works, but the cold makes Keith shriek like a girl, and so Lance lets it go.

“Welcome back, babe,” Lance tells him with vicious satisfaction.

*

Keith comes of age in the American South, in small-town Texas. For a whole six months, he’s foster brother to a preacher. If you ask Keith now, he’ll say he’s an atheist. Lance is raised in New Orleans, protege of his grandmother, climbing onto next door’s porch to ask for Hunk to come out and play at being monsters, laughing through three languages and pinching his sibling’s cheeks. If you ask Lance, he’ll say there’s things no one can understand. He’ll shrug.

_You’ve just gotta roll with the punches, babe._

*

"Oh, you're home," Shiro says, heading in from the back room and smiling. Something in Keith's face startles, goes sharp and complicated.

Eventually, he nods. When Shiro leans in to hug him, it’s slow and choreographed. Keith lets him. They’re getting somewhere. Keith ruffles Pidge’s hair as he passes, and they slap his hand away half-heartedly - which says it all, really.

“You look tired,” Allura says, holding Keith at arms’ length for inspection. Her jewelled-bright eyes narrow.

“Yeah,” Keith says. He’s swaying on his feet a little. “It’s nothing serious, I -”

Lance vaults over one of the workbenches and grabs Keith before he hits the floor, all eyelashes and rapidly sallowing skin. The weight of him crashing against Lance’s chest pushes out all his breath. That’s nothing new, but he’d assumed Keith’s shivering was from the hook of his mouth, the shock of the ice, something other, something else.

It’s easier to see, this close to a window, with the fresh light. The crystals hanging from Keith’s hip are all cracked.

“Who did you piss off this time,” Pidge wonders out loud, and shrugs when Hunk gives them a look. “What? I’m not the only one thinking that, right?”

“You’re not the only one thinking that,” Shiro says, the turn of his mouth grim. “I really wish he’d stop trying to outrace hexes once they’re cast on him. His bike isn’t fast enough for that.”

“Where would be,” Keith rasps, half-opening his eyes, “The fun in that.” He closes his eyes again, and Lance settles for persistently tapping his face until Keith opens his eyes with a low groan.

“Eyes on me, loser,” he says. He tries for casual. He’s not sure he manages it. Keith snorts but keeps his eyes open, liquid and hazy. Lance can vaguely hear the sounds of Shiro and Allura moving around and ordering Pidge and Hunk, can vaguely hear the sounds of four voices humming slowly and ever-louder, but he’s trying to do what he can here, you know?

“At least give me,” Keith’s chest rises and falls rapidly, a slow trickling line of black limning one of the veins in his throat and spiderwebbing along its brothers, “Something nice to look at.”

“Oh, come on,” Lance says, because he can’t help himself. Keith coughs out a laugh, the black liquid spilling out his mouth now. Lance wipes it away with the back of his hand.  

Keith says, “Don’t get your hands dirty.”

“That’s what she said,” Lance says, because apparently he’s going to be this bad at this every time it happens, and Keith laughs again. The whites of his eyes are slowly going grey.  

“I’m calling it,” Lance says, “Hurry the fuck up, can’t you,” and the voices around them rise louder, each of them reverting back to their first language. Lance hears Hunk’s Pidgin like he’s heard it all his life; Pidge’s German; Shiro’s Japanese; Allura’s Altean. A dying language for a living girl. Lance sees the familiar violet light rise in the glassy reflection of Keith’s eyes; as Shiro’s arm responds to the spell, as Shiro reverts the original magic that whispered silvered hurt down the blade of his fingertips, as Shiro twists it back on itself again and again and again. Shiro’s healing magic is second to none in Arizona state; maybe in the whole world. Shiro and Allura’s combined could resurrect an army.

“Anytime now, Lance,” Pidge says, drily; Lance shoots daggers at them, reaches to take their hand. It is very small in his, with bitten nails. Keith’s hand shoots out and grips onto Shiro’s wrist, white-knuckled, his breathing harsh. The grey in his eyes is darkening rapidly to black. Just before it eclipses his pupils, Shiro sends the first shockwave of the magic straight into his chest; it flares, violet and violent, light searing open, leaving no place to hide.

Keith’s eyes flare blank and gold for several long seconds. The light becomes unbearable, and then fades out, and then he sags in Lance’s arms, his eyes shut, his breathing steady, the only thing left of the hex the remnants of the black liquid on his chin.

“You’re gross,” Lance tells him, as he wipes what he can off with the hem of his shirt. Keith, probably due to being unconscious, doesn’t reply.

“I’m pouring sugar water in his shitty bike engine next time,” Pidge grouses, pushing their laptop to the side, lying flat on top of one of the workbenches and wiping their face on the front of their shirt. “Fucking Zarkon. Fucking Haggar.”

Privately, Lance agrees.

*

When Keith wakes up, half-asleep still, eyelids heavy with the ache of promised sleep, it’s dark outside and he’s alone in their bedroom; even as he registers this, he doubts it’s real.

Keith knows how illusions work. He remembers ice at his back and Shiro saying _home_ and he remembers very little after the blood curse finally took hold. No, he remembers Lance. _Eyes on me, loser._ Lance. Black in his mouth, black on their bed, in the dark it’s all the same. He jolts fully awake, hand clawing for the crystals at his belt, mouth open around the first syllables of -

He’s calling for light when he sees it from the door left ajar. He’s calling for light when he hears Lance singing in the kitchen.

Slowly, he lowers his hands. 

One breath, then another. The fire in his chest subsides. Keith keeps his eyes open, counts to make all five senses stay five. Illusion can’t account for Lance trying to keep up with Mika’s falsetto in the kitchen and failing miserably; illusion can’t account for the hole in the hem of Lance’s old sweater, the familiar worn-fine grain of it against Keith’s skin; illusion can’t account for how the inside of his mouth tastes like grave-dirt.

Keith pulls the sleeves further down his hands as he gets out of the bed, a little clumsy, a little unsteady. Somebody had taken off his jacket and his belt, and left them dropped on the floor. He nearly trips over them, because clearly the same someone wanted him to break his neck on them, and swears loudly down at the ground.

The singing in the kitchen stops.

“Keith?”

“Give me a sec,” he replies, and carefully picks his way across the chaos of their bedroom floor until he makes it to the doorway. “Good to see you tidied up.”

Lance whirls around from the the countertop, a streak of bulgogi sauce on his face. Keith knows it by the smell, knows it by late nights scouring takeaway menus in a hope of getting close to something that tastes like home could have been - knows it by ordering it on a first date whilst Lance pulled Keith’s plate towards him, bragging _oh, suck it, Keith, I can take spicy, this isn’t my first rodeo, have you ever even_ been _to Havana -_ and promptly grabbing Keith’s iced cinnamon punch and downing it, gasping _are you trying to kill me -_  

“I didn’t know you knew how to make this,” Keith says, something in his chest going warm and weak. Lance shrugs.

“Wikihow,” he replies, notices the track of Keith’s eyes across his face, and rubs at it absently. “There’s this thing called the internet, Keith. It’s great. Who even needs magic?”

“I’m gonna,” Keith says, “You can’t just learn this shit from Wiki -”

“So maybe I rehearsed it,” Lance bites back, “Fucking sue me,” and turns back just in time to miss Keith’s mouth dropping open. He closes it quick enough. Lance is looking smug enough already.

Lance pushes a timer to the side, watching it tick down for a few seconds with a look of satisfaction before he leans back against the countertop, folds his arms, and looks at Keith. Suddenly, his eyes are all no bullshit, all business.

“How bad is it,” he asks. Keith bites his tongue on an immediate _oh my god stop fussing, Lance,_ but it’s a close one. It’s taken nearly a year for them to get to this point, the uneasy balance of the scales: the weight of Keith’s honesty, the weight of Lance’s pride, wavering just enough to cancel the other out.  

“Not as bad as last time,” he admits, and Lance sighs, scrubs his hands over his face and is in front of Keith in three strides. Their kitchen is small and Lance’s eyes are very large and dark in the half-light. Puppy eyes, Hunk calls them. 90s boyband eyes, Pidge calls them.

Keith isn’t sure what he calls them. They make something twist, hard and sharp and high in his chest. Keith goes to say something, but Lance shakes his head, reaches over and traces his thumb down the line of Keith’s cheekbone. Keith goes cold, then hot. Lance curls his other hand around the back of Keith’s neck and rests their foreheads together and just says there, for a long time, unsettlingly silent and still. Keith breathes him in.

“Okay,” Lance says, eventually, softly enough to be ignored, softly enough to be denied. “Okay.”

Keith wonders if this is the part where he’s supposed to kiss him. Keith wonders if he’s supposed to do anything. This isn’t the part he’s good at. Thankfully, the timer goes off. It surprises them both. It breaks the spell. Lance leans back and goes back to the counter, opens the oven to rescue the bulgogi. Keith watches the slant of Lance’s shoulders, the way the overhead light brings out the faint gold-and-red in his hair, the nape of his neck open and vulnerable, the spot snipers and curseworkers aim for. Get you in the spine, get you on the ground.

“Don’t worry,” Keith says suddenly, “If they hurt you, I’ll get them back.”

“That’s.....not what this is about,” Lance says, rolling his eyes, then sighs and the taut bow of his shoulders loosens. “Fuck it, I give up. Dinner’s ready.”

“I think there’s still shit in my teeth,” Keith replies, and Lance pulls a face.

“Eat now, personal hygiene later,” Lance says, strides forward again and pushes Keith ungently towards a chair.

“Who are you,” Keith deadpans. “And what have you done with Lance?”

This story might not have been their story. In another world, Keith never leaves Texas and Lance never leaves Cuba and that's that. In another world, Lance dies in a car wreck at eighteen, his body cut out and his breathing cut off, and every time the team needs ice magic they wish they knew someone. In a third world, Keith dies on the kitchen floor of their apartment from a lucky strike with a blood hex; Lance is out of town and they tell Keith when he asks Lance is only going to be five minutes, and they never know if Keith knew they were lying but he let them. In a third world, Lance becomes something else, twists himself into something made of smoke and memories - which, after all, are something greater and louder than death. He walks into the desert one night, towards Zarkon, eyes glinting like drying blood, like gasoline, like the wraiths of his childhood nightmares. The skyline burns for three nights. You can see it from their apartment window.

In this world, Keith eats the bulgogi and it’s good. He cleans his teeth and then he kisses Lance, long and slow, coaxing slow confessional noises out of Lance’s throat, and that’s good too, that’s better. Later, Keith sleeps nearby, halfway off the couch and halfway dressed, drooling into Lance's jacket, his headphones in and his fingertips trailing along the floor.

Lance keeps checking on his breathing in between finishing up the last of some ordered wards, feeding the warning fire and scrubbing down his own workbench. Keith's chest rises. Keith's chest falls. He doesn't stir. In a third world, Lance walks into the desert. His heart is bleeding and his eyes are dry and he is a child of New Orleans. He knows how not to forgive. He knows how to make his hatred and his grief consume and transcend him. It happens every day.

He is wax, he is kindling, he is a thing that gives off fire.

In this world, Lance drinks coffee and watches the skyline lighten to rose. He borrows Keith's terrible jacket and kisses Keith's forehead before he leaves. Keith blinks awake and grabs Lance's wrist. His eyes are dark with sleep.

"Where are you going?" he frowns.

Somewhere else, Lance's brother flips their car on the late night highway. Somewhere else, Keith grows old by a gas station. Somewhere else, Lance walks and walks and then he arrives and he doesn't feel anything at all.

"Delivery and then Coran's," Lance tells him. "Go back to sleep."

Keith smoothes back a piece of Lance's hair, his eyes already closing.

"Don't sleep on the couch too long," Lance says. "You'll hurt your neck."

Keith hums in response. Lance lets himself out and leaves him to it.

*

Let's talk about Lance, seventh son of a seventh son, winding a banishing spell around his deadname, watching his reflection in the hairdresser's mirror with luminous eyes, burning his old skin and keeping the cleanser. Let's talk about Lance, with New Orleans as his school and his birthright and his kingdom come again. Let's talk about Lance, still painting his nails, with his wolfsbane and instagram followers, the magic in his blood always made of stars. And let's call this what it is: a goddamn victory song.

Lance has always had a very specific talent for rebirth magic, defense magic, magic that requires a leap of faith. For Keith, spellcasting like that is like voluntarily stepping into a great cavernous maw and praying the other side will be something better.

That is to say, it is alien as Lance's eyes. Keith is learning.

"Call it affinity, babydoll," Lance tells Keith, grinding rose salt at 3am in the workshop for a spell due in four hours. Lance says he works best under pressure, which is to say he works only under pressure and not before.

Keith looks at Lance's bowed head and swallows. He does not have affinity; his spells are muscle memory, driven into involuntary reflex, subtle and easy as breath. His magic calculates the margin of error automatically. It does not leave room for leaps of faith.

Keith reaches out anyway. He smoothes down Lance's hair, which is absurdly soft. It almost makes Keith angry; it almost makes him mistake the rising boil of feeling in his chest for anger. Without looking up, Lance grabs Keith's hand. He kisses his palm, yawns against it, then lets go.

"What the fuck," Keith says stupidly. "What the fuck. How long have I been in love with you?"

Lance's hands stop moving.

"I mean," he says, almost conversationally, "I guess since, I don't know, how about since _what the everloving Christ, Keith_ -"

"I didn't  mean to say it!" Keith snaps. It’s true. The words were out without him hearing them, but he’ll be damned if he takes them back now. "I'm really fucking tired, okay? It's your fault! Your constant monologue thing, it's contagious!"

"You can't catch _spontaneous love confessions_ , Keith!" Lance says, "I can't believe this. I cannot believe you got in there first, fuck, Pidge is going to murder me in my sleep, you're going to wake _covered in my blood_ -"

"I TAKE IT BACK," Keith decides, but he doesn't get the last word out before Lance covers Keith's mouth with his own hands.

They stare at each other mutinously for several seconds. Lance, Keith notices, is blushing. He's also grinning, victorious and luminous, and it lights up his eyes and Keith is -

In love with a bleeding heart of a Cuban boy, God, he's so, so fucked.

"No take backs," Lance tells him. "Even if Pidge just lost a hundred dollars over you and your _jumping the gun_. I bought flowers!"

Something in Lance's eyes is very fierce. It matches the thing in Keith’s chest. Keith shrugs.

"Don't you shrug at me, pumpkin," Lance hisses, but takes his hand away from Keith's mouth. When Keith licks his lips, they taste faintly of salt. Something in his chest has gone very quiet. Something in his chest is getting louder all the time.

"I love you," he tells Lance, very clearly, and Lance goes even brighter red. "I love --"

"Yeah, yeah, don't wear it out," Lance says.

"I'm not the one who got flowers," Keith says, and Lance scowls,"Go on. Bet you can't say it. Bet you can't stand being second. Bet you can't take it --"

"I've been in love with you for, like, forever, I totally deserved to go first, shut your fucking mouth and kiss me already," Lance bites out, "It's 3am and you have the worst timing and also I hate you -"

Keith kisses him. It's only half to put Lance out of his misery.

*

Pidge loses a whole hundred dollars. Keith had thought Lance was exaggerating.  To Shiro, of all people. Keith is almost betrayed, except for how Lance is torn between sulking and looking like he's been hit over the head still and it's hilarious enough that it all cancels out.

"You done fucked him up, buddy," Pidge says, after Lance nearly sets his own workbench on fire. "You _broke_ him."

"It's not my fault," Keith protests, knowing it's entirely his fault.

" _Dude_ ," Hunk says. He raises his eyebrows. He doesn't need to say anything more.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The art featured at the end of this fic is by the magical [paperwan](http://paperwan.tumblr.com). Reblog the original post [here](http://paperwan.tumblr.com/post/165491797872/ilgaksu-s-fic-throwing-shadows-blew-my-mind-the)!
> 
>  


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